KhalidsLife.com

Since the launch of Bar Vacancy, a trickle of jobs have been posted on the site however this has since stopped as my target audience is either away from their desks for the weekend or just not interested…yet.

Many people don’t believe in the one-man-band startup, especially if he/she is offering something for free. Something that seems too good to be true is generally ignored. People are wary of a catch or hidden cost and trying to prove there’s not whilst promoting the benefits of the site is difficult.

As a result, I’ve been focusing on recruiting representatives in Europe, mainly areas where UK bar staff travel in the summer to work, such as Tenerife and Ibiza. The idea is to have these people go into restuarants, bars and nightclubs and have them promote the site face to face with the owner/manager. By doing this, they are effectively pushing word-of-mouth advertising and will even offer to post jobs on behalf of the business.

A difficulty that spawns from the above problem is having a balance between jobs and workers. At present, I have more workers than posts, especially people looking for work in Tenerife and Ibiza etc areas. This is annoying as I don’t want people thinking there is nothing available or the site is useless so I need to act fast.

I’ve posted on pretty much every applicable forum and replied to threads for people looking for work.

Watch this space I guess!

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

In preparation for my week’s holiday in Spain I’ve been pushing to get my “to do” list finished, including the completion of two projects posted on Rent a Coder, finishing the setup of a piercing network included in the sale of my tattoo network and sorting out some back dated paperwork!

Thankfully the Rent a Coder projects are done - one extremely well and the other terribly. Nevermind, the latter only cost $30 and it works so that’s the main thing. I’ll be introducing these projects soon, both require groundwork prior to launching.

In preparation for the well written script to be launched I’ve been building a network of sites to support a marketing campaign. These sites will provide keyword specific information and link to the main site for organic traffic.

Upon my return from sunny Spain I’ll be contacting e-mail lists of people who will benefit from the site (it’s free to use) and then finally I’ll be exposing it to the masses through word of mouth, business cards, posters, Google Ads and the information sites previously mentioned.

Having an over-active brain, it’ll be difficult for me to switch off on my holiday so I’ve purchased an iPod shuffle and three books. I had a 1st Gen Nano before that was 1Gb also so I’m happy the 125 - 250 songs you can hold on a shuffle. The design is cool too meaning I don’t have to stuff another electrical device in my pocket!

Out of the three books, two were business related and one was “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu, seemingly a “must read”. They’ll keep my brain occupied and I’m sure the warm weather will slow me down a bit.

I’ll be excited to go and relax but excited to return and launch my new site.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid

For one of my new projects - still in the pipeline, - I need to do direct advertising. People ignore e-mails and Google ads are competative (and pricey!), so I’m resorting to offline marketing.

I did this before with Elite Kit, my former security supplies e-commerce store, by writing letters to security companies and nightclubs. To be honest I’m not sure if it worked as there is really no way of tracking it, unless you provide a discount code or re-directed url. But, for my new project, this is not an option. Well it is but it would just complicate things and cost more to implement.

Business Cards work well if you introduce yourself. This would require a lot of legwork, especially since this project will eventually provide a service to the whole of the United Kingdom and then expand further into Europe.

The main benefit of the site is that it’s free whereas rivals charge £25 - £35 per submission. There are only two main rivals but they are well established. Tapping into this market won’t be easy, hence why I need to think outside the box. I don’t want to waste money, especially as the marketing budget for this project is cash hungry.

Do you have any suggestions?

I understand it’s a little difficult if you don’t know the service so I’ll provide you with a brief outline. Sorry I just don’t like to give it all away until it’s launched. The site is a classifieds ads portal relating to one particular niche where turnover is high, i.e the businesses in this market are constantly needing replacements.

Let me know your thoughts, hopefully I will be launching on the 15th of this month!

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

I recently announced I was experimenting with purchasing real traffic in an attempt make money with a brand new site. Here is a quick breakdown of what I did:

• Setup Red Hot Wallpapers
• Added lots of hot and sexy images
• Put three ad units from three different companies
• Bought cheap traffic
• Attempted to make money

The three ad networks were Media Jump, Adengage and Adult Friend Finder. I spent under $20 on ads via Adengage and hoped for the best. I did manage to receive over 5,000 uniques and hundreds of ad clicks, but the revenue generated was nothing!

Adengage revenue for 60 clicks:

Adult Friend Finder revenue from 517 clicks:

Unable to measure Media Jump revenue as it fluctuates:

In short, I may have been successful if I had chosen a better niche with higher paying keywords. This was an experiment though and it did highlight one thing - chose your niche carefully!

If you chose a low paying niche and get $0.01 per click, you are going to have to generate 100 clicks to make a dollar. With a higher paying keyword in a different niche (earning $0.10 per click), you’d only need to generate 10.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

It is nice to see all my hard work finally paying off and a nice trickle of income coming my way. I’ve been working really hard and I’m glad to see some significant progress. In fact, I can report I have succeeded in achieving my first goal of $10 per day!!!

Here is a breakdown of my earnings for March 2008:

>> Media Jump’s Quick Links: $319.20

>> TTZ Media - $35.10

>> Value Click Media - $13.37

>> Text Link Ads - $7.50

>> Review Me - $10.00

** Grand Total: $385.17 = $12.42 per day! **

I still have a long way to go but it’s a start and I’m pleased

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

Recently, a fellow blog Jon Wheatley, video blogged about a statement made on website Retire @ 21.

The statement said “A lot of people spend 95% of there money on creating there website and 5% on promoting it, in fact it should be the other way round. Please do not make there mistake!“.

Jon completely disagreed, saying most large sites didn’t need to hugely advertise as their well coded design and web concept was enough to spread the good word like wild fire.

It prompts the question - How much should you spend? Allow me to use some examples…

1. OffBeatInk.com - my tattoo designs site - I have spent hundreds of dollars on marketing but the wordpress theme I use is freely available on the net, the logo is simple and I made it myself. The site is successful and ranking well in the SERPs, yet not a lot was spent on the design.

Does that mean Micheal’s statement is true afterall? No, not exactly, but he has a point. Off Beat Ink is just a blog about tattooing with a few cool wordpress plugins. It is a success because of the content I created then pushed out with the marketing. I spent more on marketing than the design, but what if the content was crap? My money wouldn’t have been well spent.

2. Kortaz.com - proxy listing site - Before I sold this I spent a lot of money on the design, with a custom coded site and free/paid placement automation. The marketing was through a few posts on webmaster forums offering, at first, a free listing. Word of mouth spread this site because it was simple, easy to use and offered something valuable to both proxy webmasters and proxy users. Jon’s point is valid here, spend time on the design and the visitors will come.

3. Ribbu.com - my cool pictures site. Again just another simple blog with some cool pictures. I spent $13 on marketing and got close to 100,000 uniques to the site through one, established, social media portal. Virtually nothing spent on marketing, just a little time on the content. Here, neither Jon nor Micheal are correct.

Three examples, three different strategies and three different successes.

I think the answer is that it’s site specific. How can you define exactly how much of your budget you should spend on a site? You can’t, and so you need to explore other avenues to ascertain what is a valid amount.

My best advice to you would be to ensure what you have is free if possible but as unique as it can be. For example, always write unique content but don’t go spending hundreds of dollars on a unique wordpress theme immediately - Tyler Cruz and John Chow didn’t (until recently), they just tweaked free ones!

If you can’t find a free solution, rent a coder to make you one, but don’t overspend with hundreds of features - you’ll only confuse your users. Google was a unique idea and custom coded, but it has one of the simplest interfaces ever.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

I seem to be in a trialling mood now I’ve got some cash to spend. With my birthday just passed and pay day today I can afford to invest in some trials, hence my previous post and now this one.

I’ve always hoovered around the idea of using pay per post as a mean of gaining credible backlinks along with creating a buzz around your site. So I decided to deposit $50 into my PPP account and run a campaign for tattoo lettering.

The process was fairly straight forward and having the power to choose the minimum quality of sites that will link to you (by means of pagerank or alexa rank) is quite appealing. We’ll see how it goes, something I’ll definately keep an eye on and report back about.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

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I’m really pleased with my progress online recently. I have managed to begin covering my costs and start making some profit, I just hope this success is long term! Running quickly through my sites, Off Beat Ink continues to pull in around 1,000 uniques per day and provides $2 income, Featured Links on Kortaz are sold out with a whopping 12 sales this month and this blog has generated a few dollars through post sponsorship!

So far so good, the next stage is to increase the popularity of my site’s further thus increasing my income. I have began on a third project that I mentioned here, I just need to add content and flood it with traffic. This is another blog but not one I need to update daily. I plan to launch either this week or next.

Taking advice from dedicated commenter Marc, I intend to attempt to sell advertising space on Off Beat Ink to private bodyart companies in the near future. Roll on 2008!

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

p.s. I have decided to blog 1-2 times per day in an attempt to increase my readership! 

Catching the attention of your visitors is one way they’ll share and discuss your site, not to mention keep coming back for more. It is important that you use plenty of quality images and videos, especially if you have extreme ones to share. People enjoy seeing others get hurt, end up in pain or embarrassed, and that’s exactly how Off Beat Ink has become so popular.

Since opening the site, I’ve covered Extreme DIY Tattoo Removal, Tongue Splitting, DIY Lip Piercing, Human Branding and Scarification. These have caught the attention of readers and become shared amongst their friends.

It is a simple tip that keeps visitors coming back for more. In a nutshell, catch their attention! 

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

Monday turned out to be a good day afterall! Work went quickly, I got a few sales (bonus money!) and I logged on to check my website stats/earnings.

Things are looking brighter and the clouds beginning to fade. I can see a positive future online but I don’t want to spoil the surprise for you…I’ll be posting my earnings at the end of the month along with a number of quality posts explaining how I did it. Afterall, sharing is caring!

In the mean time, I’ll leave you with a few links to keep you occupied…

>> Al at Self Made Minds made his first $1,000 Adsense day! - Link

>> Ashley Qualls: Teenage MySpace Millionaire! - Link

>> Have you heard of the Rubicon Project? - Link

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.